Building an online community takes more than tools. But the right tool can make all the difference.
I've been running a Discord server for about four and a half years now. When I started streaming during the pando, I had no idea that I would end up building a community. Hell, I'd never even used Discord before. I only knew what it was because I had to stop my students from using it.
Don't like reading? Click here for the final scores.
But folks kept asking for one. My viewers expected a community hub in which people who found their way to my Twitch streams could find each other, even when I was not live. As the whole streaming thing was itself an experiment in remote learning for me, this seemed a natural extension. So now, I have some mileage on me as a community moderator. I'm intimately familiar with the features Discord offers, and all the arguments against using it. I'm sensitive to them, FOSS dork that I am. I'm also keenly sensitive to the arguments about data loss inside of a forever-chat. In fact, I'm so sensitive to it that I even tried to address the problem in some small way.
But Discord, like all freemium services, is a risk. At any moment their advertising model could become intolerable, or their policy about using my data to train AI could change, or their pricing could get out of control, or some other rent-seeking nonsense common to internet services trying to stretch their profit margin.
I need an exit strategy. Anyone using Discord needs an exit strategy. The trick is to find a landing spot that users will tolerate, and that allows the community to continue in some fashion. Change is loss, and that is excruciatingly true for community platforms. Any switch comes with an attrition rate, meaning the destination better be worth the cost in headcount.
For this reason, and for another project, I've been deeply researching Discord alternatives for the better part of a year. Some of my colleagues may think me a bit obsessed about the importance of a "chat app," but I'm convinced that the communication mechanism for online communities is critical to their success. Choosing a new one could be the a matter of life and death for the community. This is a decision we have to get right the first time.
So here, humbly submitted, are my rankings of many of the Discord-like alternatives for maintaining online communities.
Evaluation Criteria
I've arrived at five broad categories in which an online community platform needs to perform.
Functionality: can it do everything required of a platform for building, organizing, and sustaining a community?
Openness: what access is there to all the tool's features and code without payment?
Security: how secure are the server and user data against common threats?
Safety: what features are available to moderate the community and protect it from malicious or unwanted behavior?
Decentralization: how reliant is the service on single points of failure?
These will be evaluated on a scale from 1-5, with 5 being the "best" for each criterion.
I've done my best to consider multiple use cases and threat models in these scores. I am, however, a flawed, biased meatsack with limited visibility. I may not have predicted your needs precisely. I may have omitted your favorite option. If so, I hope you'll afford me some grace. I did the best I could.
Oh, and I'm not touching Slack or Teams. Reasons should be obvious.
We'll start with Discord as a baseline.
Discord
- Functionality: 4
- Openness: 1
- Security: 3
- Safety: 4
- Decentralization: 1
As a product, Discord is very, very good. It serves its purpose with an absolutely minimum of friction—both from a user and administrator perspective. Even without paying, the features out of the box are well-considered and helpfully implemented. What is the product, anyway? Sometimes it seems like Discord themselves don't really know. While they bristle at being called a "Slack clone," there's a reason many companies (especially tech startups) choose Discord as both their internal team communication tool, as well as their customer engagement tool. Some truly benighted groups even choose to document their product with it.
Whatever Discord thinks it is, the purpose of a system is what it does, and Discord builds online communities. Say what you want about the company, the closed nature, the increasingly-icky ad model, the core of Discord continues to work well for bringing people together in quasi-public online spaces. The medium of real-time text, aka instant messaging, aka IRC-again-but-not-IRC, has become a default, but one not without limitations. For example, what does this do to your heart rate:
Several people are typing...
Right?! We've embraced immediacy at the expense of depth. Also, in Discord's case, accessibility. Searching Discord is a proper disaster. While messages are more or less permanent, it is by no means easy to find them again, weeks/months/years later.
But let's get into the criteria before this becomes a treatise on the nature of the modern web.
As mentioned, Discord is highly functional—for what it does. But its limitations do start to grate as time goes on. Online communities have a predictable lifecycle, in which the excitement of the early days is well-served by real-time chat. The memes are flying; people are excited to meet each other; the future holds boundless possibilities. The space will categorize and fragment, trying to organize the chaos. Over time, most of the messages come from a core group of contributors, with more occasional arrivals and questions from newcomers. This is as it should be. But what happens to the history of that community as it heads up the scroll? How does the past usefully inform the future?
Discord has made some affordances for this with "Forum" type channels. Even so, the past is hard to explore.
Discord is not open, so not much to say on that front.
Discord messages are not end-to-end encrypted. Pretty famously, Discord will give up your data for law enforcement. Although they've recently added end-to-end encryption for video and audio, the implementation is clunky. And of course, all the text data in a Discord server is unencrypted. But hey, at least they support MFA?
Safety, in the sense of "Trust and Safety," may be Discord's greatest strength. I have greatly appreciated all the moderation tools at my disposal. Even a modestly sized server like mine (~3000 users) would be impossible to manage without automatic word catching, granular permissions on channels and roles, and multiple response options including timeouts, kicks, and bans. Discord also has a very involved onboarding flow that makes certain there is an agreement to community rules before users can participate.
And need we even mention decentralization here? If Discord fails, your community goes dark.
Signal
- Functionality: 2
- Openness: 4
- Security: 5
- Safety: 2
- Decentralization: 1
Best for: communities who value secrecy above all.
I love Signal. Like, a lot. I'm a daily user and a donor. I've even convinced most of my friends and family to use it as our primary mode of text communication. And yes, I've organized a community with it—one for which privacy was (at the time) of paramount importance. I am deeply familiar with all advantages and drawbacks of Signal.
As a secure chat, Signal does just fine. Well, better than fine from a cryptography perspective. It is the gold standard in end-to-end encrypted communications for good reason. But the strongest cryptography in the world is meaningless for a community if the platform is unusable. Fortunately, that's not the case for Signal. Emoji reactions, stickers, (some) formatted text, and even voice/video calls make it an indispensable tool for secure communications that feel familiar and feature-filled enough for normies. Nobody will be totally lost moving from another chat app to Signal.
If you're looking for nothing but chat, Signal is fantastic. But many aspects of community-building online are simply unavailable here. To start, there are only group chats. There is no conversation threading or channels to keep conversations organized. You can have multiple chats, but that gets messy quickly.
I can't even pin posts. In fact, post searchability is a limited feature by design. Most group chats enable disappearing messages. That's great to prevent incriminating evidence from piling up; it's terrible for reviewing what a community discussed previously.
Also absent: granular roles in each chat, or anything resembling moderation tools. As an admin, I can only ban users for unwanted behavior. I can neither automatically prevent harassment nor provide a more measured response than the banhammer.
I should mention that almost all these tradeoffs are accepted limitations in service of Signal's primary objectives.
On the point of decentralization, Signal has none. As Meredith Whitaker recently wrote, all Signal app traffic flows through the same cloud infrastructure, much of which depends on AWS.
If your community's threat model is such that eliminating all possible points of evidence collection against you matters above all else, Signal is the clear winner. Maintaining that level of operational security naturally comes at the cost of some other creature comforts a community could come to covet.
I didn't set out to alliterate the hell out of that sentence, but I didn't stop it either.
Matrix
- Functionality: 3
- Openness: 4
- Security: 3
- Safety: 1
- Decentralization: 4
Best for: communities who value independence over all, with security/privacy a runner-up.
Oh, Matrix. You are the football that I, in my zigzag-stripe shirt, keep trying to kick. In theory, the Matrix protocol and Element, its flagship client, should be the ideal for decentralized, encrypted communications. Using Element feels a whole lot like using Discord. Heck, it can even bridge communications from Discord and other platforms. Sadly, as time goes on, the nicks from the rough edges start to accumulate.
Before going further, we need to define some terms. Matrix is the federated, encrypted messaging protocol published and maintained by the Matrix Foundation. Synapse is their "reference implementation" server technology written in Python. Synapse is the most common way folks start their own Matrix servers. There are other server implementations, now including "Synapse Pro," which I guess is a partial rewrite of Synapse in Rust? Element is the first-party client that users would use to connect to Matrix. They need an account on a server, and of course matrix.org is the flagship Matrix server where the vast majority of users have their accounts. But you can point Element at any Matrix server to log in, as long as you have an account on that server.
Confused yet? If users are unwilling to select a Mastodon server, do you think they'd be willing to put up with this?
Ah, but I get ahead of myself. Let's start with what's good.
Matrix uses a similar end-to-end cryptography scheme to Signal. "Rooms" (chats, channels) are not encrypted by default, but they can be made so. There have been noted issues with the previous cryptography library used by Element, but the newer vodozemac library is in much better shape. Of course, not all Matrix clients use the new hotness.
A given Matrix server can create multiple rooms (channels), and even group them into "spaces" such that they appear quite similar to Discord servers.
Inside the rooms, things feel familiar. We have threads, emoji reacts, and message search (sorta). On some clients (but not Element), there is the possibility of custom emoji.
And that's...it. Element promises more, like native video conferencing, but heaven help you if you're trying to self-host it. It is technically possible, but by no means simple.
"Technically possible, but by no means simple" aptly describes up the entire Matrix experience, actually.
I ran a private Matrix server for about a year and a half. Why private? In two public Matrix rooms I had joined—including the room for Synapse admins—I experienced a common attack in which troll accounts spam the room with CSAM material. Horrible, but not just for the participants and admins in the room. Through the magic of federation, every server who has a user participating in the room now has a copy of the CSAM material, and has to take action to remove it. This requires a manual curl request on the server itself, because Synapse has an appalling lack of moderation tools. It's so bad that, without third-party tooling, you can't even ban a user outright from a server; you have to manually ban them from every single room.
Then came September 2, 2025. The outageof matrix.org caused by drive failures was not an indictment of Matrix's database management or recovery process—in fact, I was quite impressed with their response. But it did put the lie to Matrix's decentralization for me. Almost none of my friends could use Matrix, even though I was hosting my own server. The onboarding pipeline (especially via Element) is so focused on the flagship server, I daresay it comprises the plurality of Matrix accounts. It's not easy to get any statistics for all Matrix users, but that is my guess. How "decentralized" is that, really? Just because something can be decentralized doesn't make it so.
Isn't that right, ATProto?
I'm probably a little too close to this one. I so badly wanted Matrix to work, and I tried to make it work for my purposes for a long time. Ultimately, the pain points overcame the benefits. But if you care most about an intersection of message encryption, federation, and decentralization, and you're willing to put in quite a lot of admin time, Matrix can be a viable community chat platform.
Rocket.Chat
- Functionality: 5
- Openness: 3
- Security: 4
- Safety: 3
- Decentralization: 3
Best for: communities that want a smooth Slack-like experience and are willing to pay for independence
What if you could self-host Slack? That's basically the Rocket.Chat experience. It's slick, easy to get set up, and loaded with integrations. All of this comes, as you might expect, at a price. While there is an "open source" Community Edition, its featureset is limited, and you may quickly find yourself looking at the paid plans for additional features or support. Rocket.Chat is one of several platforms that follow this freemium model. I don't really begrudge them this approach, but it can be frustrating for a community just finding its feet. To their credit, they do offer discounts for open source projects, not-for-profits, and other organizations on a per-request basis.
Rocket.Chat does support end-to-end encrypted communications. Key management can be a little clunky, but I was impressed it had the feature at all.
Be aware, however, that these centrally-managed services will of course allow administrators to audit messages. That is a documented part of the moderation flow for Rocket.Chat. If you demand anonymity or an inability for administrators to view your messages what are you doing in that community? Rocket.Chat might not be right for you.
I'll quickly mention why I gave it a score of 3 on decentralization. Seems a bit high, right? Until recently, Rocket.Chat supported Matrix federation. Since October 2025, it has pursued a native federation scheme that would allow separate Rocket.Chat instances to share rooms and DMs across server boundaries. This, although not open source, is extremely compelling.
I really enjoyed my experimentation with Rocket.Chat, and found myself thinking seriously about it as an alternative to where I was. The cost is just steep.
Zulip
- Functionality: 4
- Openness: 4
- Security: 2
- Safety: 2
- Decentralization: 2
Best for: A split between forums and real-time chat
I've been playing with Zulip for a bit now, and I still don't really know what to make of it. From one perspective, it has a bit of an identity crisis, unsure of whether it's a forum or a chat platform. From another perspective, this dual identity is its greatest strength: real-time when you want it, asynchronous when you don't.
Zulip is self-hostable, with some caveats. As the plans and pricing detail, anything beyond 10 users starts costing some cash. It adds up quickly. Seemingly everything can be done in a self-hosted manner, you're at the mercy of some truly byzantine documentation.
While there is great functionality to be found, it comes at a rather steep price for organizations of any size—whether administrative overhead, or just plain cash for the managed services. Although to their credit, they do offer a community plan with many of those higher-tier features available for qualifying organizations.
One feature you won't find anywhere is end-to-end encryption. The developers seem rather against the idea. Multi-factor authentication must be enabled in the config files, not the admin frontend—hardly ideal.
Unless I'm missing it, there do not appear to be any serious content moderation tools in Zulip. The community moderation toolkit is, in my opinion, the barest of essentials. Nearly all of these capabilities are reactive, not proactive. It seems the expectation is good-faith participation, with those agreements and guarantees handled elsewhere. Having been on the wrong end of malicious intent, I don't feel safe enough with these tools.
Lastly, on decentralization, it's mostly a miss. Even for self-hosted plans, anything above the free tier requires a zulip.com account for plan management. And federation? Forget about it. Although every Zulip server can technically host multiple Zulip instances, they don't interact with one another.
If anything, writing this overview has left me more confused about Zulip than when I began. I just don't know where it fits, or who can afford these prices for a growing community.
Mattermost
- Functionality: 4
- Openness: 2
- Security: 4
- Safety: 2
- Decentralization: 1
Best for: Fortune 100s and governments
Take a look at the front page of the Mattermost website, and you'll get an idea of the kind of organization they expect to be using this thing. Odds are, your nascent online community ain't that. While the software may superficially look like some of these others, its intention is entirely other. Community building is not what's going on here. Rather, Mattermost's objective is highly-focused, integrated workflows that involve human communication alongside machine automation. Business operations are what...matter most.
Mattermost describes itself as "Open core," and the core is...rather tiny. Even when installing the self-hosted version, you'll soon need a rather expensive license for real work. Starting at $10/user is a clear indicator of the intended customer base. It ain't me, that's for sure.
Mattermost prides itself on a certain kind of security—specifically, the regulatory kind. Configurations for all manner of compliance regimes are provided in the documentation. Normal security is present as well, including MFA. Not so much end-to-end encryption, although mention is made of encrypting the PostgreSQL database. That's novel, although not a solution to the problem addressed by E2EE.
I honestly don't think Mattermost's developers are capable of imagining a positive argument for an audit-resistant application. This thing is designed for monitoring user activity six ways from Sunday.
Consequently, "safety" in the way we've defined it here is absent from Mattermost's conception of the universe. If you're logging on to a Mattermost server, about a thousand other trust mechanisms are in place to guarantee you won't act like a doofus on this app.
Hardly a point to mentioning decentralization here, beyond the possibility of self-hosting. Ultimately though, you only get what your license key allows, and since the server is only open core, Mattermost itself is quite the point of failure.
Discourse
- Functionality: 3
- Openness: 5
- Security: 3
- Safety: 5
- Decentralization: 3
Best for: anything but real-time chat, really.
I'm gonna be honest: I kind of love Discourse. I'm not sure I have a reason to deploy it, but I want to. Everything Joan Westenberg writes in this piece in praise of Discourse resonates with me. Community for the long-haul? Transparency in governance? Built-in systems for establishing human trust?
That's what's up.
But Discourse has one significant difference from everything else on this list: it is primarily a forum, not a real-time chat app. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, necessarily, but it sure is different. If your community expects instantaneous communication, Discourse may be a big adjustment. Or it might not be sufficient on its own for your needs.
But what does it do well? Forums! It's very easy to navigate categories and topics. The UI provides clear signals for when something happened. Oh, and search is simple.
Maybe the best way to think of Discourse is as an anti-Discord. It's everything Discord isn't: asynchronous, open source, and self-hostable.
Discourse is 100% open source. I'm running it right now in my homelab, with access to all the plugins and features I'd expect, costing me only the time it took to install.
I was additionally quite impressed with the moderation tools. Not only are they plenty of tools to track user activity, but the moderation decisions are public by default. This is a good thing! The community can hold its leaders accountable for upholding their end of the bargain: to act in good faith in support of the community.
One area in which it falters a bit is, of course, end-to-end encryption. Very few of these tools enable it, and when they do, it can be clunky. It's entirely possible that the right option for a community is one of these and Signal for sensitive, out-of-band communications.
If you start to look around, you'll notice Discourse fora everywhere. There's a good reason for that! The software is rock solid for what it is. And maybe your community needs its depth of features more than it needs instantaneous messaging.
Revolt Stoat??
- Functionality: ?
- Openness: ?
- Security: ?
- Safety: ?
- Decentralization: ?
Best for: Appreciating how much work it takes to make one of these work
Stoat, née Revolt, was meant to be an open source Discord alternative. Recently, they received a cease-and-desist regarding the name Revolt, and renamed to a...weasel.
Anyway this thing is so far from being ready for prime time, I only include it here to call out the project. I wish them the best and hope for good things, especially since you can self-host the server. But a lack of stability and features prevent this from being useful for anything beyond experimentation. Maybe someday.
The Tool is Not the Community
Choosing a platform on which to build a community is just the beginning. It's vitally important, yet insufficient to a community's success. Tools do not make a culture; the people engaging on it do. Most of my time building the culture of TTI has not been a technical endeavor. What we have—and I think it's pretty special—has little to do with Discord's featureset. It just happens to be where the people are. The options presented to you here allow you to seek a path that aligns with your objectives, principals, and needs at a purely mechanical level. The rest depends on the human element.
Score Breakdown
| Platform | Functionality | Openness | Security | Safety | Decentralization | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Discord | 4 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 1 | 13 |
| Signal | 2 | 4 | 5 | 2 | 1 | 14 |
| Matrix | 3 | 4 | 3 | 1 | 4 | 15 |
| Rocket.Chat | 5 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 18 |
| Zulip | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 14 |
| Mattermost | 4 | 2 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 13 |
| Discourse | 3 | 5 | 3 | 5 | 3 | 19 |
| Stoat | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? |
Read the original article
Comments
I was considering making a similar list since I was very interested in checking out alternative chat programs, but I have to say this list isn't that good. A lot of the alternatives here aren't ACTUALLY Discord alternatives.
Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people, follow news, talk in forums, etc... It also has a lot of features people hand-waive like a really good roles system, moderation and server management tools, a bot ecosystem, etc.
Signal is a Whatsapp alternative for 1-on-1 chats with friends and small groups.
Rocket chat is a Slack alternative for people wanting to host a server for a community. It's not a platform, you need to register and login to each server manually.
I haven't used Zulip but AFAIK it's like Rocket Chat.
Ditto on Mattermost.
Discourse is a forum.
Stoat is basically the only thing here that actually competes on Discord and it's really barebones. There isn't a genuine Discord alternative because it turns out it's really hard (and expensive!) to do what it does, kind of like a Youtube alternatives scenario.
By cheeseomlit 2026-02-1013:327 reply >Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people
Do they? Personally I've never willingly joined one of those massive servers, only when forced to by some projects that refuse to host their content anywhere else- and its always a terrible experience. 99% of my discord usage is just a group chat with my IRL friends, so when looking for alternative I dont really care about roles and moderation and bots at all. I just want a group text chat, a mobile client for it with notifications, and drop-in/drop-out voice calls
They have >200 million DAUs and guesses say they have >10K servers with >10K users. Assumptions from a tech crowd who were used to IRC should be taken with a grain of salt.
Now if we're just looking for alternatives for ourselves, cool. But I think the reality is that most normal users do fully lean into the social aspects of Discord. A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.
By giancarlostoro 2026-02-1019:261 reply I have said many times, Discord isn't just chat, it is 100% a social media app.
I think there's definitely more than 10 thousand servers... Unless they mean active? Even so... there's 3.2 million Discord servers with the Disboard bot installed, that's just Disboard, a way to advertise your Discord. There's likely millions more with no bots.
By price 2026-02-1123:51 I think the gp is saying that out of those millions of total Discord servers, there are >10k of them that each have >10k users.
In other words there are >10k large servers, in addition to the much larger number of smaller servers.
By cheeseomlit 2026-02-1014:361 reply I'm just questioning the 'most users' aspect- just anecdotally among my 'normal' peers those big servers dont seem like the most common use case. For every big million-user server there could be a million private 10-user servers
By cheikhcheikh 2026-02-1017:052 reply By definition it should obvious the million-user server is a popular feature since it has a million user.
By gusgus01 2026-02-1018:33 Not necessarily, if Discord has more than 200 million Daily Active Users, and there are a few million-user servers. Those million-user servers could mostly be made up of the same million users (or only a small percentage still actively engage but they never left because there's no disincentive to leave servers instead of just muting them) meaning it's used by less than 1/200th of the total users of Discord.
Realistically, that's probably not the case, but it's impossible to know the true popularity without more statistics.
By AceyMan 2026-02-1018:40 obligatory citation: "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded." —Yogi Berra, MLB HOF catcher & manager
By forgotaccount3 2026-02-1017:271 reply > A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.
Going back to something you said earlier:
> Rocket chat is a Slack alternative for people wanting to host a server for a community. It's not a platform, you need to register and login to each server manually.
So the primary thing is that there is no SSO for each server? No centralized auth system? Because everyone I know that uses discord 'found' the discord via some official means of those million person discord's like the official Marvel Rivals one. If the only purpose of the centralized system is not requiring a new login for every server, then a centralized auth system could be implemented by relying on people's other social media accounts. Login with Google/Facebook/Apple etc.
By elendee 2026-02-1113:36 you could sign into A and your friend could sign into B using the single sign in, but you wouldn't be able to message each other is the problem, there is no platform bridging the logic gap, so you would both need to have A and B open. (afaik. didn't read about Rocket yet)
By jsbisviewtiful 2026-02-1019:471 reply > Do they? Personally I've never willingly joined one of those massive servers
Large community servers are plentiful. I'm in a few that are definitely several hundred if not a few thousand users. It's pretty common to have a public server for cities too.
By pseudalopex 2026-02-1019:541 reply The question was 1+ million people. Any alternative in the article but Signal could handle 100s or 1000s to my knowledge.
By jsbisviewtiful 2026-02-111:231 reply Multiple sources cite different totals but it does seem like there are multiple 1+ mil servers.
https://www.deepcord.com/leaderboard/top-members/all/all-siz...
By pseudalopex 2026-02-111:56 The question was not are there Discord servers with 1+ million people. The question was do most Discord users use Discord to join servers with 1+ million people.
By secabeen 2026-02-1017:57 > A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.
That is totally true, but is that server really going to be one with NSFW content or channels? Those huge servers are great spaces, but every one I've been on is fully functional if you are on a "teen account" without doing ID/Age verification.
By neutronicus 2026-02-1018:44 I don't join massive servers, but I use Discord almost exclusively with strangers.
All my IRL group chats are WhatsApp. Discord is for the local board game bar, various regional tabletop gaming scenes, my favorite basketball podcast, my favorite miniatures game, etc.
When I want to get into a community, these days I get a Discord link (which I guess I prefer to the Facebook Groups of a decade ago).
By orwin 2026-02-1014:47 Any multiplayer game that doesn't have an integrated matchmaking have _big_ discord servers. Basically most paradox games, civ5 and civ6, probably others. All the organising that used to happen on forums now happens on discord servers
By w4rh4wk5 2026-02-1018:16 From personal experience, yes. Most of my friends are part of multiple large servers, often interacting with a small subsets of these communities. At this point, I don't think there is a comparable alternative.
By davkan 2026-02-117:51 My experience using discord for technical projects and communities is largely similar to IRC. I jump in, ask a question in the appropriate channel, someone answers quite quickly, i say thanks, I leave.
I’d prefer having openly searchable forums and chat archives and to use IRC but I can’t say the experience is that onerous.
By colordrops 2026-02-1018:281 reply "Discord alternatives aren't needed because I'm different from the majority of millions of people that use it differently than me."
By Redoubts 2026-02-1518:27 nobody joins a million person discord, it's too crowded
By scyzoryk_xyz 2026-02-1013:51 Agreed 100%, can confirm same here. All true.
Not for most users who are blindly following their communities, seeking lock-in, tasteless design, eating rat poison, driving off cliffs so on and so forth.
This may be a good time to consider whether one program should really be handling all those things, or if it's putting too many eggs in one basket and asking too much of any one program. Discord seems comparable to a Chinese superapp, made to trap its users and become an irreplaceable part of their everyday lives. I think I understand it's hard to give up some of these features once you're used to them, but it seems worth doing. Personally I use a mix of IRC, XMPP, and Matrix, mostly IRC (internet people) and Matrix (IRL friends/family), though. I believe XMPP and Matrix both have some sort of voice or video chat support across some clients and servers, but if someone were to try to call me through them, it would seem "weird" to say the least. I usually get people on Mumble if we're gonna play a game and want a voice chat going. It's rock-solid, everyone I play games with seems fine with it. When we're done voice chatting, we close Mumble, a bit like hanging up a phone call.
As for video calls and screen sharing, not something that's been super normalized in my circle. Some of us stream to Twitch with OBS, but it's rare to say "hey come watch my computer screen for an hour in a 1-on-1 call". There is just one guy who seems like a heavy Discord user who seemed to want to do this sometimes. I showed him Jitsi to placate him, we can both join a session in a browser without accounts and I can see his screen. I wasn't a big fan of that, though, I'd rather just not let that be normalized, personally. A screenshot, video clip, describing it to me, letting it go, any of that seems better than being trapped in a screensharing/video call of uncertain length.
By alfnor 2026-02-1015:25 The private servers I'm in always have a few people screen sharing whenever a voice chat is active. They're either sharing their gameplay (semi-privately, hence no Twitch) or they're co-watching movies. Oh and every so often, screen sharing is used for getting someone's opinion on image editing or a song in they're making. I've also given people remote tech support which is way easier to do when their screen is visible.
But it's worth noting that as an older Gen Z, this is just how people hang out nowadays, so we'll be watching anime together in the server until we fall asleep or whatever. That's why screen sharing isn't as useful as screenshots and video clips.
By axus 2026-02-1017:18 The benefit of one big app is a consistent identity. Seeing that an account was created years ago, and how long it's been a member of the current server, helps identify spam and scams. When a user you're familiar with provides a link to another Discord server, its more trustworthy.
Discord has also done a good job protecting identity; better than DNS has :) I use lots of other apps with "real" identity, Discord is good for centralizing non-work, non-family activity.
By pixl97 2026-02-1015:04 The particular problem with most of humanity is we value convenience over just about everything else.
Superapps are just going to just keep winning because of this.
By 4WIW 2026-02-1017:19 You can use as many different apps for yourself but good luck sustaining a community/team/org that requires learning 5 apps for participation, especially when not all users are savvy.
In order to sustain an ecosystem instead of mega-app, that ecosystem needs to be really smoothly integrated, and I know of no good examples of this
By tabbott 2026-02-1018:30 This article looks rather rushed -- the description of Zulip is not accurate, and I suspect that folks working on the other products may feel the same way about how their projects are described.
I lead the Zulip project, and I'd like to clarify that Zulip's free community pricing does not have user limits, either in Cloud or self-hosting. The 10 user limit for free mobile notifications only applies to workplace/business use. Larger communities are encouraged to submit a simple form to get approved for notifications beyond 10 users.
And this complaint seems quite strange:
> Even for self-hosted plans, anything above the free tier requires a zulip.com account for plan management.
How would a paid subscription work without an account for managing it?
This is an important and timely topic, but I wish a more deeply researched article was the one being widely circulated.
By saghm 2026-02-1013:23 This a good point that I hadn't considered. At least in my experience, DMs are a useful but secondary feature that mostly are useful because it's not uncommon to make connections with people from interacting in the servers themselves. I had been mentally modeling Discord as a chat app, but in a lot of ways it feels more accurate to think of it almost like Facebook with just groups and DMs, only the groups are realtime chat. Over that years I've heard various people talk about using only groups and maybe events as the last things they still used Facebook for, and I deactivated my account years ago but still use Messenger because of the years of contacts I had already built up on it (and the fact that it still is possible to use with a deactivated Facebook account), which provides at least some anecdotal evidence that Discord is basically providing the stickiest features of Facebook.
By dvngnt_ 2026-02-1018:14 Stoat isn't working well for me. It's taken over 24 hours to try to register a new account. First I couldn't register after doing several captchas. Then I had to wait for a verification email which took over 12 hours. I signed in to one client, but attempting to reset a password results in the same waiting game and error when selecting a new password.
I wish for the best, but they're probably putting out fires from the increased load
By giancarlostoro 2026-02-1018:171 reply The closest realistic option is probably XMPP and Mumble. I just think both need a modern UI that supports everything that Discord offers OOTB. I am working on a client for XMPP on the side, nothing special yet, but I can login and chat with myself on a prosody instance, so there is that. Would love to work on open source full time, but it never seems to pay the bills. I do intend on eventually open sourcing my client.
By tcfhgj 2026-02-1210:39 Matrix + Cinny might be a good option, too.
It has a Discord like UI, but the voice and video they're working on isn't released yet
By Semaphor 2026-02-1013:44 All the people I know who joined big servers, have nitro and do it for their emotes. My impression of really big servers is that they also skew really, really young.
That said, I agree that not having to create a new account is a huge barrier of entry removed. A lot of the servers I’m in would probably not be a thing, or at least be even smaller, if everyone had to create an account to join.
By pseudalopex 2026-02-1015:51 They discussed community and moderation features. The functionality and safety scores considered them.
Many groups use Discord as a Slack alternative or forum.
Discord's single sign on is convenient. But the list's point was any central platform is a risk.
By Bender 2026-02-1115:56 being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people
Personally I would never want to join that noise. If an IRC channel has more than 50 people I tend to avoid it unless it is a technical channel that may have some knowledgeable people. If I want to reach millions of people I will find a way to join the conversation of an influencer on their podcast but hopefully such a need never comes to pass for me.
By zelphirkalt 2026-02-1613:36 1 million users? I have not seen a single one of such servers, let alone joined such a server.
By atoav 2026-02-117:39 IMO most Discord channels I have to use could be better replaced by a traditional web forum. Then at least could you find the knowledge in there using a web search.
By unethical_ban 2026-02-1015:13 Nothing open source and self hostable will be a "platform" then. Being dependent on a central platform/identity server is the way they control you and increase the friction of leaving.
I think the client side could still be a "platform" like pidgin, allowing login and simultaneous participatiin in multiple servers, without needing to be fully centralized.
What disappoints me about this list is the lack of consideration for video calls and screenshare.
Ironically, Signal actually ranks a -1 for privacy in this use. Presumably you're already using Signal and getting mainstream contacts to start using it too. You probably have a basic profile that at least includes your real name, and might also have your picture. Maybe you're even one of the 7 people in the world that use the Stories feature in it. Well good news, now all of that is also unconditionally available to anyone in any group you ever join, including any future changes you ever make to that info, unrevocably forever into the future.
Signal has a fun dark pattern where it unrevocably grants permissions for anyone you allow to contact you to see everything in your profile for the rest of time. It has only a single trust level with contacts effectively: full trust. This is unacceptable in any tool you use for online community, unless you exclusively use it for online community and can decline to provide any info in this full-trust level. Unfortunately Signal also makes very sure you can't have a second account, by tying your account to a phone number, and only allowing one Signal instance per mobile device.
Is Signal good? Yes, but only exclusively for communication with people you already trust.
EDIT: typos
By raxxorraxor 2026-02-1010:565 reply I dislike Signal as I need to identify myself through info that is protected. Like a phone number for example.
Not a privacy app in my opinion. Sure, might be good for some use cases... but overall there are better solutions.
Keep an eye on Whitenoise. It's basically taken the technology behind Signal and placed it atop Nostr, so rather than signing up with a phone number, you do it with an npub (pubkey). Still in very early days so the features aren't all there yet, and battery use could be better, but they've got the basics of it working already.
By aaravchen 2026-02-113:41 SimpleX is another option. These don't have discoverability for lay people users just joining though, which is actually a huge network effect positive for Signal in the family and friends use cases. However it avoids the issues with the public group chat privacy. It ends up coming down to client and protocol features for those. SimpleX has a more extreme privacy threat model than Whitenoise so user contacts tend to be throw away (for good or bad), which generally doesn't work for public communities.
The real kicker is that almost nothing has the community automation tools and administration of Discord which is the really hard lift.
Completely not my experience:
I have lots of Signal contacts I cannot phone, since the phone number is never shared by default. Not even the signal contact is shareable. It is way too privacy focused to work easily.
i.e. I cannot even match two people I have in contacts unless one of them sends me their hidden username. Then they can talk to one another.
And people in my contacts don't use their full name. In groups, they often share the first name, making it confusing as hell. And many use an arbitrary nickname, most often the abbreviated first name I think but sometimes truly random stuff, and might even change that yearly with no mapping in my history to tell me who they were.
By aaravchen 2026-02-113:34 I, and all of my contacts, have the default setting for this which makes me discoverable on Signal by phone number look up, but I have phone number sharing disabled. That's the default settings. I've had no issues at all with discovery.
By aaravchen 2026-02-113:31 Signal has had the ability to share a username instead of phone number for a while. You definitely want to pair that with not sharing your phone number with Signal contacts (the related option released at the same time).
By lukan 2026-02-1013:34 "but overall there are better solutions."
Can you please name some?
By Gud 2026-02-1011:04 Why the downvotes? A messaging app that requires a personally identifiable token is inherently not good for privacy…
By derkades 2026-02-108:36 The part about stories is not true. When sending a story you can choose who to send it to. To make it easier you can even put people in groups
By ozlikethewizard 2026-02-107:375 reply You can have multiple instances of signal on a mobile device, and you can use VoiP or eSIMs to register. Signal with an online persona revealing no identifying information, registered to a cash purchased eSIM on an ungoogled android is as good as your getting. Why do you think so many jurisdictions are trying to ban both GrapheneOS and Signal.
By kenniskrag 2026-02-1011:043 reply In europe you need identification to buy a sim or esim.
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/9ziqfi/european_cou...
By Normal_gaussian 2026-02-1011:20 To be clear, your linked map shows that it is not a blanket "in europe". Around 20 European countries don't need an ID to get a SIM card and 30 do.
For those learning about political nuance against the backdrop of current propaganda, it is worth noting that the UK and Ireland do not require registration and that the populous are significantly politically opposed to it; and then Russia requires registration and has one of the most linked up registrations.
Didn't know that the UK, the Netherlands, or Portugal aren't part of Europe...
Also, you can buy phone numbers with monero for 0.08$ https://smspool.net.
And what happens when the next guy buys that same number and registers on Signal?
Phone numbers are recurring costs. And to keep a truly private one you must keep paying without ever disclosing personal info and that is really hard. Signal is a privacy nightmare for long term use.
There is a week long registration lock protected by a PIN. Your contact list is protected by that PIN as well. They cannot access your chats. All your contacts will get a notification that the contact has changed when they go to talk to your phone number or get a message from your number.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059792-Si...
This is good and means no one can impersonate you using your phone number, but doesn't solve the recurring costs issue, you still need to buy a new number when someone registers yours, and every financial transaction puts you at more privacy risk. And is terrible UX, imagine having to add your contacts new numbers every other week.
By vel0city 2026-02-1015:38 People generally already have phone numbers. In the markets Signal is targeting its rare for people to not already have a phone number. It would be quite strange for someone to be paying for a phone number just to use Signal, and if you don't already have one then yes I'd suggest Signal isn't the choice for you.
Not only that, but its a unique identifier people generally have already had and generally have already shared and historically been OK with sharing with people they want to talk to. That's a part of the reason why Signal originally chose that way of finding contacts, people were already connected in that way. It makes on boarding people massively easier and greatly reduces the friction of people actually using it. A messaging platform is pretty useless if I can't easily find my friends on it.
> And is terrible UX, imagine having to add your contacts new numbers every other week
Practically nobody is getting a new phone number every other week. And once again, if you are the kind of person getting a new phone number every other week, I'd agree Signal probably isn't the platform for you.
If you don't have a phone number or your number changes all the time, I agree Signal isn't the choice for you. If you already have a phone number, are OK with what having a phone number means in terms of privacy, and that phone number is pretty stable, then Signal isn't a bad choice to use to message on.
It does mean theoretically some large organization (like a government with a warrant) can potentially see "John Doe has this phone number, this phone number is related to Signal, therefore John Doe possibly uses Signal", but personally I'm not too worried about that tiny bit of information leakage. Besides, with enough effort one could probably ID that looking at internet traffic patterns unless you're really that paranoid about controlling your network routing. Especially when that means I'm able to actually convince family to use the platform, as they're used to just looking up people by phone numbers and don't want to have to deal with managing yet another unique identifier on yet another platform. If they had to register another account and manage yet another identity, they wouldn't use it, and thus I'd be stuck just talking SMS with them which results in worse privacy outcomes for our conversations.
By aaravchen 2026-02-114:43 One statement is not related to the other here.
Getting and maintaining an active phone number privately is indeed quite hard, partially by governmental design.
Signal only requires occasional/rare proof of control of the registered phone number. It also has very little visible data the provider can access on your account, even if they had a reason to assist in breaking your privacy by look it up from the phone number. Without Signal foundation direct support, the phone number linkage to your Signal account is completely opt in by you only.
So in terms of privacy, Signal is actually very good about the phone number and leaves it mostly to you how public you want to be about it. They're primarily using it as a finite controlled resource to limit how easy it is for people to spin up arbitrary new accounts. Other projects might use some cryptocurrency junk that effectively equates to paying for accounts, but Signal uses what you probably already have.
By JCattheATM 2026-02-1017:01 Which is very backwards/nannystateish, same nonsense in AU. Thankfully anyone can buy one anonymously in the US and just use that even if it's more expensive.
By dns_snek 2026-02-108:21 You can do all of that but you shouldn't have to when using a privacy-focused messenger, and most people won't so they'll be exposed and suffer the consequences if they use Signal expecting a certain level of privacy (and pseudo-anonymity).
It's a terrible anti-feature and the only reason they're not being punished for it is because there aren't many alternatives to pick from.
By aaravchen 2026-02-114:28 You could have a second actuve eSIM if you have a phone that supports more than one (no phones support more than 2 active simultaneously). Though technically the phone number only needs to be accessible for the initial account setup so I guess you could have a burner phone you switch out eSIMs on. Each Signal application only supports a single account though. So you can have one, and if you have a work profile you're not otherwise using you could have a second account in that instance.With the new Private Spaces you could potentially have a third as well.
So you _may_ be able to have up to 3 simultaneous Signal accounts on the same device.
I'm using my work profile and Private Space for things I can't share a Signal install with though. And I dont want to buy and maintain an extra phone number from a telco just to have another Signal profile.
By ekianjo 2026-02-108:56 Of course it's revealing information. If I know that two users that are identified by their phone numbers are talking to each other every day, this is a clear connection you can exploit. Metadata is only useless if you have no imagination.
That's privacy for someone who cares deeply and will get it somehow no matter what, not default zero-effort privacy for the ignorant. (Which WhatsApp does pretty well for example.)
By oarsinsync 2026-02-108:511 reply > default zero-effort privacy for the ignorant. (Which WhatsApp does pretty well for example.)
Can you elaborate on what default zero-effort privacy for the ignorant WhatsApp offers, that Signal does not?
By OJFord 2026-02-1011:22 I don't know, I'm not familiar with Signal. But features such as described above with worse privacy than the basic chatting functionality detract from it, it's not just that it would be a bonus if it were better, because that's exactly how effort comes in, having to know about it, and the typical layman user just blindly uses it.
Take Telegram for example, where only explicitly 'secret' chats are e2ee, you have to go out of your way, it's not the easy path.
How could Signal be considered privacy-conscious ? The first thing they do is ask for your phone number.
Signal has profiles nowadays that can be used to connect with people without sharing phone numbers. The latter are only used for signup and discarded immediately after.
I don't know how Signal works and I never used it, but could I signup with a phone number and keep using it with another number, on the same phone?
By alias_neo 2026-02-1011:01 Yes. The phone number is just for activation, once activated, you can swap the SIM and carry on. Or have the SIM that receives the activation text in another phone, or be virtual, or whatever.
By pseudalopex 2026-02-1016:17 Another comment contradicted this.[1]
By reactordev 2026-02-1010:341 reply I doubt they are discarded when push notifications exist
By Krizzu 2026-02-1012:27 push notifications are not related to phone number, but rather to a randomly generated token in app.
By direwolf20 2026-02-1010:341 reply WhatsApp sends a copy of all your messages to ICE. Signal doesn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_o...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/uk/nsa-staff-used-spy-...
Millennials and older generations witnessed this happening bit by bit, some of us tried to fight it, but ultimately it’s everywhere now, and apparently it’s been so ubiquitous for so long that people aren’t even aware of it anymore.
I am the person who asked for the source.
1) I do not believe for a second that Meta would actually implement something that would remove their own ability to read those messages.
2) We do not have any proof that their claimed e2e chat service is actually compromised.
The matter of fact tone of the parent made me think there was some actual proof or at least something more than speculation. That's why I asked for a source.
I am not sure I understand what you’re saying.
If meta can read those messages, then they’re most definitely not e2e encrypted.
Given the historical record, you would be a fool to assume that any service run by a public company isn’t fully tapped by US intelligence agencies. They’ve been tapping anything and everything they can get their hands on, why stop at whatsapp?
Let me flip it around: what proof do you actually have that it is e2e encrypted? Zuckerberg pinky promised?
You didn't actually flip it around at all.
They're stating they doubt Meta would ever allow full e2ee, which is not evidence but simply speculation.
AND
They asked for a source/evidence to prove their hunch is more than speculative.
By ses1984 2026-02-1015:39 What standard of proof is required here? It’s not criminal court.
The original post I replied to simply asked for proof, without also stating they doubt meta would ever allow e2ee.
My post is more directed at other readers who might take the absence of a smoking gun as an assumption of safety.
By attila-lendvai 2026-02-1011:021 reply whatsapp is facebook; do you need any other "source"?
i'd be surprised if they didn't have straight out government logins...
Of course I need another source. I think you're right too but this is just speculation. I thought you had access to some actual information.
By direwolf20 2026-02-1011:482 reply They're getting sued for it.
By andsoitis 2026-02-1012:59 > They’re getting sued for it
If this is the case you’re referring to, then I don’t know that it is proof of your assertion, in fact maybe the opposite: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/31/us-author...
By lotsofpulp 2026-02-1012:57 Anyone can sue anyone for anything. I have no doubt the US government has access to whatever data it wants from all businesses, but a lawsuit is not evidence of anything.
By akimbostrawman 2026-02-1212:37 because privacy != anonymity e.g you have privacy in your home but everbody still knows you live there.
By DivingForGold 2026-02-1011:19 Give Signal a burner phone.
By zikduruqe 2026-02-1014:32 No they don't.
They ask _for_ a phone number. It doesn't have to be yours.
By alt187 2026-02-1011:00 Because they have an huge PR campaign and a lot of money to invest in keeping their place.
By gsaslis 2026-02-1010:49 I didn't think I'd ever be part of any group of 7 people in the world, but today is that day, I guess.
And I know one more of those people already!
5 more to go.
By fsflover 2026-02-109:41 > Ironically, Signal actually ranks a -1 for privacy in this use
And it ranks near Discord in terms of removing the single point of failure.
By mastermage 2026-02-107:06 [flagged]
Everyone talking about this seems to completely forget WHY everyone's using Discord: It's fun.
Discord has animated (custom) emoji, loops videos properly, silly bots, and fantastic voice chat with screen/game streaming to a HUGE amount of simultaneous users. The end user can pick and choose who they want to watch on-the-fly while remaining in the same voice channel.
The entire concept of a business using Discord for anything other than customer engagement is completely orthogonal to the very basis of the platform. It was built for gamers! It caters to GAMERS.
Repeat after me: DISCORD IS FOR GAMERS! People who want to have fun playing games with their friends. Any other use of Discord is secondary.
If you want to replace Discord with an alternative you must target gamers. What do gamers want? They want to have fun! They want a frictionless voice chat and super easy screen streaming. They want silly emoji and looping gifs in chat.
They don't care that much that the search doesn't work well. They don't care that it's centralized. They don't even really care much about this age verification check!
I swear, more teenagers (and younger) will scam the age verification system to see adult content than actual adults using Discord. Because the adults aren't there to see "adult content".
By soulofmischief 2026-02-1015:57 /slap was perfectly enough fun for me without sacrificing the freedom of my peers and myself.
I use Discord all day and it's not for gaming. It's to involve myself in specific communities. And I'm not looking to migrate to a platform that caters specifically to gamers, because it will eventually make the same anti-user tradeoffs that Discord has made over the years, as ad money and payment processors and stakeholders continue to boil the frog.
This sudden news is very unwelcome. Unless something changes, I will begin the process of leaving each server, making whatever off-channel connections I need, then deleting my account, and either choosing or developing an alternative which suits my needs.
> They don't care that much that the search doesn't work well. They don't care that it's centralized. They don't even really care much about this age verification check!
Yes, and that's the problem. Manufactured consent cannot be used as a justification for further manufactured consent.
By zaneyard 2026-02-1018:06 I think the reason discord got so popular is because of the ease of use. Being able to join a server with a link (and not even having to download a client if you don't want), being able to see who's in voice without "connecting" to the server like mumble or teamspeak, persistent chat. This is what is unique about discord; all those other things came later. This is the user experience the alternatives need to replicate. Custom emojis are not a deal breaker, the hangout experience is.
By opan 2026-02-1014:41 This is an interesting angle, actually. For me, IRC is the most fun out of the big three (free software chat protocols) of IRC, XMPP, Matrix. The variety of bots and their commands (I never see bots on XMPP or Matrix, kinda odd), being able to post shell command output into my chat window easily (e.g. `/exec -o figlet meme`), the culture around stuff like slapping people with a fish, pasting popular ascii stuff like the shrugging guy or the denko face. I don't really have anything like that stuff on the other platforms. They seem a bit sterile by comparison now that I think about it. I wonder how much is technical and how much is cultural. It's probably way easier to write an IRC bot than bots for the others.
By TechSquidTV 2026-02-1014:393 reply They dont just not care that it's centralized, that's the only option they would ever entertain. A very sad truth is people HATE decentralization.
By hiccup_socks 2026-02-1014:451 reply >A very sad truth is people HATE decentralization.
no, people hate friction.
it just so happens that most/all decentralized things have more friction than centralized ones.
99% of people do not give 1 shit in either direction of centralized vs. decentralized. they just want an app that is easy and "just works".
True, but I haven't found any good decentralized options for almost anything that don't have enough friction to scare the average user away. I'm talking about decentralized options that are actually decentralized, not "potentially decentralized in theory but no one uses them in a decentralized way".
I do see a future where we crack the code to a smooth flow that does allow for decentralized networks, but it does suck for most people currently.
By Flere-Imsaho 2026-02-1015:451 reply Email is decentralized is it not? It's pretty frictionless to create a new email address with whichever provider. You can have as many as you want. Some are free, others you pay for. You can even run your own email server (if you want to deal with the pain that entails).
I think we're so used to email we forget how well it works.
By jjice 2026-02-1017:44 Actually great point. It's been a bit ruined by spam detection and trust, but definitely still a good decentralized option.
> I think we're so used to email we forget how well it works.
You're right and that's quite a testament to it.
By TulliusCicero 2026-02-1015:49 People don't hate decentralization itself, they hate the poor UX (and sometimes lack of features) that decentralization usually entails.
By Saris 2026-02-1018:28 I doubt people hate decentralization directly, it's just that the decentralized services out there are difficult to use and lack features people are used to.
By AbraKdabra 2026-02-1019:251 reply It's fun until they ask for a face or ID scan.
By guydi77 2026-02-111:13 I’m pretty sure that’s only for channels marked nsfw, which are gated today anyway (with a simple prompt, but I just click off because I’m not there for nsfw).
